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Docks, wharves aud boom dam of tlie ancient city of Noruinbega, on the Charles River at Watertown, Mass. 




Boom dam on Cold Spring Brook, opposite Watertown. 



THE DISCOVERY 



ANCIENT CITY OF NORUxMBEGA. 

^ Communication 

TO • 

THE PRESIDENT AND COUNCIL OF THE AMERICAN 
GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY 

AT THEIR SPECIAL SESSION IN WATERTOWN, 
November 21, 1889. 

BY 

EBEN NORTON HORSFORD. 



CAMBRIDGE: 
PRIVATELY FEINTED. 






©too JunBrrt em's fiftj copfes prfntcli, none of toftCc!) ate (or sale. 



This copy^ No ^.SLX... 



is presented to 



:/i^f-crr2-h^'\ 






JEntbctsitg JPrtss: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Page 
Address to Judge Daly, President of the American Geographical Society, 

ANNOUNCING THE DISCOVERY OF THE AnCIENT CiTY OF NORUMBEGA 5 

Reply of Judge Daly 6 

Story of the Discovery of Norumbega 9 

Letter of John G. Whittieb 10 

Whittieb's Poem of Norumbega 47 

ViNLAND, Poem of, by E. H. Clement 59 



ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS. 



Page 
Docks, 'Wh.veves, and Dam of the Ancient Citt of Norumbega .... Frontispiece 

NoKSE Boom-Dam opposite "Watertown " 

Tower at Fort Norumbega, Weston - 8 

Photograph of Speaker 9 

Plan of Fort Norumbega 16 

Norse Pavements for drying Fish on Stony Brook 16 

Norse Remains in the Basin of the Charles 18-19 

Maps showing that Norumbega was in the Latitude of Boston 20 

MosuR Wood (Burrs on Oak- Trees) 24 

Xorse Wall and Canal, Section op 25 

Norse Wall One Thousand Feet long 26 

River flowing through a Lake (the Charles and Boston Back Bay) . . . 30-31 

Map of Norse Dam, Docks, Wharves, and Fishway at Watertown .... 34-35 

Map of Region of Massachusetts-Bay Colony, by John Winthrop, 1634 . . 36-37 

Photograph of Fishery Pavement, Stony Brook 38-39 

Tablet of Inscriptions on Norumbega Tower 41 

Amphitheatre 43 

Photographs of Stone Relics found in the Region of Norumbega .... 45 

Maps showing the Region of Norumbeg.4. 46-47 

Map of Region of Vinland 57 

TowEE, View of, with Tablet at Fort Norumbega 63 



THE DISCOVERY 



ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBECA. 



Judge Daly, President of the American Geographical Society : 

It is now nearly five years since I discovered on the banks of Charles 
Eiver the site of Fort Norumbega, occupied for a time by the Bretons some 
four hundred years ago, and as many years earlier still built and occu- 
pied as the seat of extensive fisheries and a settlement by the Northmen. 
It is nearly as long since that discovery was the subject of a communica- 
tion which I had the honor to address to you, in your official capacity, on 
the first of March, 1885, which communication was published in the October 
Bulletin of the American Geographical Society of the same year. 

I have to-day the honor of announcing to you the discovery of Vinland, 
including the Landfall of Leif Erikson and the Site of his Houses. I have 
also to announce to you the discovery of the site of the ancient City of 
Norumbega. 

To perpetuate the date of these accessions to geography, a Tower has 
been set up at the site of Fort Norumbega, where I first found remains 
of the work of the Northmen. 

It had been proposed to accompany the unveiling of the Tablet on 
the Tower just completed with a summary account of the way by which 



6 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

I had been conducted to my later discovery, together with other exer- 
cises appropriate to the occasion, — including a Poem rehearsing the story 
of the Vinland Sagas, and music contributed by our Scandinavian friends 
and by a party of ladies from Norurabega Hall of Wellesley College, so 
called in honor of the discovery which was communicated to the pubhc 
at about the time the corner-stone of the Hall was laid. But the lateness 
of the season has made the out-door gathering impracticable, and an 
invitation has been accepted to meet in this hall. 

As the Geographical Society has consented to give to the occasion the 
honor of its official presence as at a special meeting convened to receive the 
announcement of the discoveries, I ask permission to lay before you copies 
of the maps, ancient and modern, charts, sketches, photographs, drawings, 
manuscripts, original plans and surveys, which I have gathered for the study 
of the problems of Vinland and Norumbega and for the purpose of illus- 
trating the detailed papers now in press, with the request that they be 
regarded as an earnest of the later presentation of the results of my work, 
in print, to the Society. 

I have to ask your further permission to present here and now a smn- 
mary of the course of my more recent investigation, which has resulted in 
the discovery of the site of the City of Norumbega. 



JUDGE DALY'S REPLY. 

Professoe Hoesfoed, — Allow me to say, on behalf of myself and 
colleagues, that it affords us great pleasure to congratulate j^ou on your 
discovery. When you made your communication five years ago to the 
American Geographical Societj^, I was inclined to think that the facts 
then presented created a strong probability that the locality indicated 



DISCOVERY OF THE AXCIEXT CITY OF XORUMBEGA. 7 

by you was in the region where the Northmen settled in this country; 
and the further and more extensive researches you have since made con- 
firm that conclusion. It is especially interesting at this period, when 
we are preparing to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the 
discovery of this continent by Columbus, that the facts you have ascer- 
tained should be brought to light in connection with this earlier discovery 
of America. "We have hitherto but inadequately appreciated the North- 
men as a race, — their adventurous spirit, their capacity, and the degree of 
civilization to which they had attained in an age when Europe was but 
emerging from the darkness that had enveloped it for many centuries. 
Prof. A. H. Sayce, the learned Assyrian scholar, in a recent paper has 
declared, and given his reasons for, his belief that the primitive home 
of the Aryans — the central point of the departure or migration of that 
great civilizing race that at a very early period spread over the whole 
of Persia and India, and to the westward over the whole of Europe and 
America — was not, as has hitherto been supposed, the country lying on 
the slopes of the mountains of the Hindoo Kush, between the head-waters 
of the rivers Saxartes and the Oxus, but was some place in the south- 
eastern part of Scandinavia; which would make the Northmen the pro- 
genitors of the Greeks, the Eomans, and, with the exception of one or 
two races, of all the nations of modern Europe ; which, if further re- 
searches should establish to be the fact, would make them the greatest 
race in the history of mankind. 

Du Chaillu, in his recent work on the Viking Age and the Ancestors 
of the English-speaking People, — a people now so widel}' distributed over 
the surface of the globe, — refers to those countries in the north of Europe 
from which the Northmen came as the birthplace of a new epoch in the 
history of mankind. All this is very interesting in connection with what 
is now generally admitted, — that America was discovered by the Northmen 



8 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

Ove centuries before the arrival of Columbus, and that for a considerable 
period thereafter they maintained a settlement upon our northeastern 
coast, and kept up during that time an intercoiurse with the mother 
country. 

It remains only in conclusion, Sir, that I should express my high 
appreciation of your labors and of the results that have followed them, and 
of your liberality in the lofty, characteristic, and imposing Tower that you 
have caused to be erected, to mark one of the places where the Northmen 
dwelt, and to commemorate these discoveries. 




MEMORIAL TOWER AT FORT NORUMBEGA 

SET UP 1889. 

AT THE MOUTH OF STONY BROOK, ON THE CHARLES. 



STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF NORUMBEGA. 



As we all know, there have been before the world for many scores of 
years, in some instances for as many centuries, certain grand geographical 
problems, challenging the spirit of research, the love of adventure, or the 
passion for discovery or conquest. They are such as these: Where was 
Atalantis ? Where was the Ultima Thule ? What is there at the North 
Pole ? Was there a Northwest Passage ? Where were the Seven Cities ? 
Where were the El Dorado of Ealeigh, and the Landfalls of Leif Erik- 
son, of Columbus, of John Cabot, of Verrazano ? And where were 
Vinland and Norumbega ? 

The number of unsolved problems is steadily lessening. The last two 
mentioned are soon, with your consent, Mr. President, to be withdrawn from 
the column. I might, perhaps, say something concerning the other themes 
that have been named, which might interest you, and properly claim 
recognition at the outset of a story of geographical discovery. But you 
wUl, I am sure, prefer to anything else I might say here and to-daj, a 
plain statement of the reasons for the faith that moved me to set up a Tower 
in Weston, at the junction of Stony Brook with the Charles. A wish that 
falls in so wholly with my sense of the requirements of the occasion leaves 
me no alternative. I will attempt to comply with it as best I may, 
asking your indulgence for the repetitions I may not escape in telUng 
the story of how I found the seat of the earliest European colony in the 
New World. 

Most who hear me will doubtless connect their first conception of 
Norumbega with the well-known poem of Whittier. You will not have 



10 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA, 



forgotten how, as you read the poem, your sympathies went out to the 
Christian Knight, faint with his fruitless quest for a marvellous city of 
which he had heard, — a city of towers and spires and gilded domes, — 
and a fine people, rich in furs and pearls and precious stones ; nor how, 
as the pomp and splendor of a dying October day faded from his sight, and 
with them, in his rapt vision, the possible goal of his hopes, he exclaimed, 
almost in his latest breath, — 

" I fain would look, before I die, 
On Norumbcga's walls." ' 

I have recently received the following letter from Mr. Whittier : — 

AlTESBtTRT, Oct. 30, 1889. 

Dear Friend, — That adventurous Scandinavians visited New England 
and attempted a settlement here hundreds of years before Columbus, is no 
longer a matter of doubt. I had supposed that the famed city of Norum- 
bega was on the Penobscot, when I wrote my poem^ some years ago ; but I 
am glad to think of it as on the Charles, in our own Massachusetts. Thy 
discovery of traces of that early settlement at the mouth of Stony Brook and 
at Watertown is a matter of great archaeological interest, and the memorial 
Tower and Tablet may well emphasize the importance of that discovery. 

Regretting that I am unable to witness the unveiling of the Tablet, 

I am 

Very truly thy friend, John G. Whittier. 

You may have heard of Eoberval, a French admiral, as the Lord of 
Norumbega ; or you may remember Milton's reference in " Paradise Lost " 
to the "icy blasts from the north of Norumbega;" or you may have 

1 The poem as published was preceded by a paragraph which read as follows : " Norumbega is 
the name given by early French explorers to a fabulous country south of Cape Breton, first discovered 
by Verrazano in 1524. It was supposed to have a magnificent city of the same name on a great river, 
probably the Penobscot. The site of this barbaric city is laid down on a map published at Antwerp 
in 1570. In 1G04 Champlain sailed in search of the northern Eldorado, twenty-two leagues up the 
Penobscot from the Isle Haute. He supposed the river to be that of Norumbega, but wisely came to 
the conclusion that those travellers who told of the great city had never seen it. He saw no evidences 
of anything like civilization, but mentions the finding of a cross, very old and mossy, in the woods." 

= See page 43. 



DISCOVEKY OF THE ANCIENT CITT OF NORUMBEGA. 11 

read of Norumbega, the "Lost City of New England," by the Eev. Dr. 
De Costa; or it may not have escaped you that four or five years ago 
there was something in the local papers about the Landfall of John Cabot 
in 1497, and the site of Norumbega. 

Much of what I have recalled to you referred to the region not re- 
mote from our own. The old fort at the foot of the Tower concealed 
within its walls the entrance to the pathway that led to the desert's secret, 
which the Norman Knight sought for in vain. The secret was won only 
after protracted siege. It was a most fascinating bit of conquest; it had 
the charm that gathers about the finding of long-lost treasure, something 
of the rapture that comes with the witnessed fulfilment of prophecy. 

The story of Norumbega was old, — very old for Massachusetts. Its 
antiquity may have furnished reason for believing the story to have had 
some foundation in truth. It had at least this : An Englishman had left a 
record of having seen a city bearing the name Norumbega, and the city 
was three quarters of a mile long. This man — David Ingram, a sailor — 
had been set on shore by Sir John Hawkins, in 1568, at Tampico, on the 
Gulf of Mexico, with some hundred and twenty others, in stress for lack 
of provisions. He had wandered all the way across the country, visiting 
many large Indian towns, and coming at length, in 1569, to the banks of 
Norumbega. He sailed in a French ship from the Harbor of St. Mary's 
(one of the earlier names of Boston Bay), a few hours distant from the 
Norumbega he visited, and ultimately got back to England, where he again 
met and was kindly received by Sir John Hawkins. He told a story that 
surpassed belief. He had seen monarchs borne on golden chairs, and houses 
with pillars of crystal and of silver. He had visited the dwelling of an Indian 
chief, where he saw a quart of pearls ; and when his listeners murmured, he 
capped the relation with the statement that in one chiefs house he had seen 
a peck of pearls. His relation was laid before Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 
the kinsman of Sir Walter Ealeigh. Thevet, who had been at Norumbega,^ 

1 The picture facing tlie titlepage was taken from the Newton end of the Watertown Bridge. At 
the extreme left is the stone dam built by the Northmen. Below are the outlines of two docks, the 



12 DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

on the banks of what he pronounced " one of the most beautiful rivers in 
all the world," and who had not improbably been at the mouth of Stony 
Brook, was present, and confirmed Ingram in part. Coronado's experiences 
in New Mexico, 1540, enable us to confirm him in more ; and the brilliant 
researches of Mr. Gushing of Zuni memory and achievement, and the col- 
lections of Professor Putnam of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, enable 
us to comprehend most of the remainder of his relation. There were pearls ; 
they were found in fresh-water clams ( Unios). They are gathered by the 
peck at the West to-day ; the Peabody Museum has half a bushel of them 
taken from an Ohio mound by Professor Putnam. And there were furs. 
French merchants (I have it from the historian of New France) in one year 
burned two hundred thousand beaver skins to keep the price up. These furs 
came from the land of the Bretons, — from here. And there were precious 
stones, — turquoise and onyx and garnet : I have samples of them. And 
there were ornaments of copper and silver and gold : they are found in 
Ohio mounds to-day. The pillars of quartz crystal and columns of wood 
wrapped with thin sheets of silver and even of gold, I can credit, from 
what I have personally seen in some parts of Mexico. On festive occa- 
sions such sheets were displayed, so Mr. Gushing tells us, as flags are with 
us in honor of a day or of an event. Much of what Ingram related was 
what he had seen. Of some things told by him he had evidently only 
heard : the stories of the Incas of Peru and of the Montezumas of Mexico 
were among them. His hardships had brought confusion to his memory. 

Hakluyt wrote a book (carefully edited by the late Dr. Gharles Deane, 
and published by the Maine Historical Society) to induce England to under- 
take the colonization of the country of Norumbega. Its discovery entered 
into some of the plans for penetrating the Northwest Passage. Sir Hum- 
phrey Gilbert lost his life in an expedition undertaken in part to find 
Norumbega. I have many ancient maps on which Norumbega as a country 

lower one immediately above the Lewando dye-house. The plot is given again on page 34, in a por- 
tion of the engi-aved map of Watertown much enlarged by photography, and presents the canal — 
the ancient basin and fish- way and a third dock, now walled up — running parallel to, and just above 
the bridge. 



DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 13 

is as prominent as New Spain or New France or Virginia, as well as many 
others having devices indicating a city against the name of Norumbega, 
subordinate to the name of Norumbega as a province. 

All these belong to the class of old recorded stories ; most of them 
were in print before the landing of the Pilgrims. One could not help 
thinking that they must have had some foundation in truth ; the alterna- 
tive involved too many conspirators and too many nationalities. 

Champlain at the opening of the seventeenth century came, imder 
Admiral De Monts, to our coast, and spent a good portion of three years 
exploring the bays and headlands and islands from Cape Cod to the Bay 
of Fundy, and studying the people and the products of the soil. The 
literature of geography was familiar to him. He tried to find Norumbega. 
He felt that somewhere there might be found the remains of a city. He 
went many leagues up the Penobscot from its mouth, but found nothing. 
He left the name on his map in the region where he sought for the city, 
about the mouth of the great river, but recorded his conviction that those 
who described it had not seen it. This learned and conscientious explorer 
justly commanded confidence wherever his publications were read. His 
readers felt his doubts. Lescarbot became merry over what he thought the 
delusion. Still, Capt. John Smith hoped to find the city or country ; and 
for a long time, down nearly to the end of the seventeenth century, the 
name of Norumbega appeared on Dutch maps. It appeared even on occa- 
sional maps of the eighteenth century. But at length it was to be found 
only in ancient history or geography, and in the name of a noble Hall 
set up by the public-spirited citizens of Bangor. 

Let us look a little further at the foundation of the old story ; we shall, 
after all, find it quite substantial. 

Verrazano, in 1524, came up to the angle of the Charles at Cambridge 
City Cemetery, near the remains of the then still standing Norman Villa, 
on Maiollo's map, which seems to have occupied the site of Leif's houses. 
He found and left us the name Norumbega in — oranhega, — the initial N 
accidentally obliterated from the map, and the m of the second syllable 



14 DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

replaced by n, as given on his brother's map, — near the ancient St. John's 
Harbor, our modern Gloucester. Not far from Cape Ann, on the local 
map of Essex County of to-day, we have Norman's 0, uniformly called 
Norman's Woe, and also Norman's Cove, of palpable Norse derivation. 
We have thus, from an early date, evidences that Northmen have been on 
our coast.^ Gomez came to Massachusetts Bay in 1525, and Capt. John 
Kut to St. John's Harbor (Gloucester) in 1527. 

A little later Parmentier, in 1539, found the name Norumbega applied 
to a land lying southwest-a-quarterwest from Cape Breton. Allefonsce 
under Roberval, in 1543, determined the great fact (the source and the 
explanation of countless mistakes in cartography) of there being two Cape 
Bretons, of which the more southern, referred to by Parmentier, was in 
the forty-third degree, and identical with Cape Ann. Within the limits 
of this forty-third degree was a river, at the mouth of which, according to 
Allefonsce, were many rocks and islands (Minot's Ledge, Cohasset rocks, the 
Lizard, the Roaring Bulls, the Graves, etc.), up which river, as Allefonsce 
estimated, "Jifieen leagues from the mouth, was a city vMch is called Nonmibegue." 
" Tliere tvas," he said, "« fine people" at the city ; "and they had furs of many 
animals, and ivore mantles of marten skins." 

Allefonsce, a pilot by profession, has never been doubted. On him, 
more than on any one else, rest the identity of one of the Cape Bretons 
with Cape Ann, and the fact of there being a river, with a city on its 
banks, both bearing the name Norumbegue, between Cape Ann and Cape 
Cod. I procured from the Bibliotheque Nationale photographic copies of 
the original pen-made maps, and manuscripts of Allefonsce, that I might 
consult him in the original. There is no room whatever for question that 
a few leagues up a river having many rocks and islands at its mouth, in 
the forty-third degree, there was in 1543 a fine city called Norumbegue. 
I might cite many authorities, if time permitted.^ 

^ We have other names of Norse derivation in Massachusetts ; as for example, Nauset, Naumkeag, 
Naumbeak, Namskaket, and Amoskeag. 

^ Among them are Ptolemy, Ramusio, Mercator, Lok, Maginn, Plancie, Solis, and Hakluyt. 



DISCOVEET OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 15 

Wytfliet, in 1597, in an augment to Ptolemy, says: "Norombega, a 
beautiful city, and a grand river are well known." He gives on his map 
a picture of a settlement, or villa, at the junction of two streams, one of 
which is the Eio Grande. Here, as we shall later see, was a cfreat fishery, 
and of course dwellings and appurtenances to domestic life for persons 
engaged in the industry. I have framed into the Tower the stone mortar 
in use at the settlement. Wytfliet on his map had confounded the hum- 
bler settlement with the city, — perhaps merged the latter in the former. 

Thevet in his text places " Fort Norombegue " at the point where the 
Tower stands, and where Wytfliet placed the city, — at the junction of two 
streams ; and so the two together led me into temporary misapprehension. 
The fort was occupied in Thevet's time as a trading-post by the Breton 
French. To them he ascribed the construction of the fort. Thevet says 
(I read from my copy of the " Cosmographie " open before me) : " To the 
north of Virginia is Norumbega, which is well known as a beautiful city, 
and a great river ; still one cannot find whence its name is derived, for the 
natives call it Agguncia.^ At the entrance of the river there is an island 
very convenient for the fishery." He describes the fort as surrounded by 
fresh water and at the junction of two streams. The CUy of Norwmlega on 
his elaborate map was Icmer down the river.^ The French who occupied 
the fort called it Fort Norombegue. It was surrounded both by a ditch 
and a stockade. The ditch remains. 

It was largely what Allefonsce (1543) and Thevet (1556), who were on 
our coast as explorers, wrote, and what was pictured on Wytfliet's map, 
that led to my finding the fort. When I had deduced from the literature 
of geography that the fort was at the mouth of Stony Brook, I drove directly 
there, and found it on my first visit. 

But I early found, besides the fort, the evidences, long unintelligible to 
me, of a great industry (to which I have alluded), involving, among other 

1 Iroquois for "head," — which applies to a great rook in the margin of the pavement of the 
fisheries, and now at one end of the reservoir dam of the Cambridge Water Works. 

2 Tlie settlement at the junction of the two streams, and the site of the city lower down are given 
on the maps of both Thevet and Mercator. 



16 DI8C0VEKT OF TUE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

things, graded areas some four acres in extent, paved with field bowlders. It was 
a most extraordinary display, to which I may later again refer. 

As already remarked, after Champlaiu, — known, as he was, as a most 
competent explorer and conscientious man, whose itinerary was most full 
and clear and painstaking, and whose maps were without precedent for 
palpable evidences of care, — after Cham plain and the pubUcation of his 
unsuccessful exploration of the Penobscot, belief in the existence of the 
City of Norumbega came to be generally less confident, and finally, as 
Dr. Palfrey's '• History " shows, to be practically abandoned. 

To one modern writer more than to any other we are indebted for keep- 
ing the story of Norumbega alive. Rev. Dr. De Costa, at that time editor of 
the " American Magazine of Plistory," wrote and published a few years ago 
the most fascinating story of the " Lost City of New England." He wrote 
and printed several papers, gathering together for preservation the scattered 
fragments of legends and history bearing on the subject. His conviction, 
however, like that of Champlain and the later personal explorers, except 
Allefonsce and Thevet, was that if the ruins of the city were ever to be 
anywhere found, they would be found on the Penobscot, where our grand 
old Poet placed the " Barbaric City." 

Yet every rood of the Penobscot to its extreme source has been scoured 
in the search, and no trace of the remains of a city has been found. There 
still exist on that noble river evidences of what the story grew from which 
was told to Champlain, — among them the name of Nolambeghe, preserved 
or known to the Indians of to-day (Vetromille), and the name Baya del 
Loreme on many ancient maps, as well as other names of Norse derivation 
on local maps of Maine ; but time will not permit us to pursue them. 

As the lost city was not on the Penobscot, and as it was not thought pos- 
sible that it could have been elsewhere, the search was at last given up. 
So Norumbega was lost. In view of the great interests involved, one might 
almost wish — say you? — that it could have remained lost for a few 
years longer. 

In my judgment, however, if it were possible, in addition to the dis- 






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DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 17 

covery by the Northmen, to prove that the Phoenicians visited and long 
occupied parts of this country, or that this country was the Atalantis of 
Pliny and Solon, — either or both of them would dim, by the measure of 
the faintest Indian-summer haze only, the transcendent glory of the life- 
work of Columbus. 

But there was another country lost, — lost from a still earlier period. 
This was Vinland. Or it may perhaps more correctly be said that it is only 
recently that it has been discovered and demonstrated that there was cer- 
tainly a country hereabout to which the Northmen came, nine hundred 
years ago. 

Do you anticipate me by exclaiming that Vinland and Norumbega are 
one ? 

But between such conclusion and the date of the earlier conviction 
of what might be found by research lay five years of almost constant 
study and personal exploration, with the co-operation of the engineer and 
draughtsman and photographer at almost every step. I only felt that I 
saw the end almost from the beginning, and lodged a caveat five years ago 
in connection with the Norse name of Cape Cod, — Kjalarnes, — and waited. 
I repeated my conviction with purposed vagueness more than once in my 
address at the unveiling of the statue to Leif in Boston two years ago. 
And if I tell you now that I have found the ancient city of Norumbega, as 
well as the fort and the river and the country of Norumbega, and learned 
somewhat of their marvellous history, — it will, I hope, help to give you 
courage to bear with me in the unfolding of a relation which I cannot 
hope much to modify or shorten. 

Let me tell you of a little prediction that I made at a certain early 
stage of my research, which if my reasoning from data discovered were 
correct, must be realized. It was the test of the trustworthiness of my 
method of research. I said to myself and to my household : " If I am 
correct, every tributary to the Charles will be found to have, or to have 
had, a dam and a pond, or their equivalent, at or near its mouth or 
along its course." That was my prophecy. One may study at leisure its 



18 DISCOVERY OF TEE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA, 

fulfilment on cither side of the river from its mouth to its source. It 
was lonj^^ after this prediction that I found its verification at every point I 
examined, even as far as fifty miles from its mouth along the Charles, in 
Millis; and, farther still, in Holliston. The reasoning that led up to 
necessary dams and ponds at or near the mouths of the tributaries led 
with like force to a great dam on the Charles itself; and that also is open 
to your study. 

On the Tablet of the Tower one may read that Norumbega was the name 
of a fort at the base of the Tower, of the river flowing past us, of a city 
on its banks, and of a country that reaches from Long Island Sound to the 
St. Lawrence ; and that memorials of the people who occupied the country 
are strewn throughout this vast region. And now to be still more specific, 
I may say there is not a square mile of the basin of the Charles that does 
not contain incontestable traces of these people, which traces will pres- 
ently be as obvious to others as they now are to me. 

Shall I tell you at the outset why this has not been known before ? It 
was a secret that, among other things, lay hidden in the signification of two 
or three Algonquin roots. 

You are all familiar with the fact that the organs of speech of different 
persons and peoples differ more or less. Some lisp ; the language of the 
Senecas scarcely requires the closing of the lips ; the Narragansett language 
had no r ; the Abenaki, rarely, /; the Hawaiian language, like the Italian, is 
marked by the frequent recurrence of vowels ; m and n are sometimes con- 
founded with each other, as i and p are, and, as the Chinese illustrate to us, 
I and r ; so too b and v, u and tv, are interchangeable.^ The early settlers 
said Marvill Head where we say Marble Head.^ The Dutch have difficulty 
with the English it, v, and w. The German has difficulty with our pronun- 
ciation, and we with his. 

Long ago — he has been dead a hundred years — a Moravian mission- 
ary, Zeisberger, a German, came to this country, and noted a peculiarity 

1 Roger Williams noticed among the tribes of Indians, even in places within forty miles square of 
area, that I, n, and r were dialectic equivalents in the Indian name of " dog." 
' See Wood's New England's Prospect. 



V 



Hf.twkbn I'a'.bs iS and 19. 



^ tlFf mi ii'i ^^ 



•i'\ 'SI 



V 




'Ji 



^\ 



DISCOVEKT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OP N0KUMBE6A. 19 

in Algonquin speech. Heckewelder, another German, remarked the same 
thing. Dencke-' observed it. Du Ponceau, a Frenchman, noticed it. This 
peculiarity was that the Indians of the tribes of the Algonquin family, 
which prevailed throughout New England, could not, — I beg you espe- 
cially to remark it, — could not utter the sound of h without prefixing to 
it the sound of m ; so that in uttering bi, the word that means " water," 
the Indians said mbi, — just as the Latins, possibly preserving the same 
root mM (autochthonous of old), said imbibo, " to imbibe or drink ; " just 
as the Greek sailors who come to our capital city speak of coming to 
mBoston ; just as in Central and South America and in great portions of 
Africa one may find to-day in names of persons and places b preceded 
by m. (See Stanley's names, and Du Chaillu's and Brinton's, and names 
in missionary records.) 

Many hundred years ago the country we call Norway was called Nor- 
begia^ and Norobega,^ which are the same philologically — as we have just 
seen — as Noruega, or Norvega, or Norwega ; the b is the equivalent of u, 
or V, or 10. 

The people of Norway settling in a newly discovered country claimed 
the sovereignty of that country. Vinland belonged to Norway, — that 
is, Norbega. But the Indians among whom the Norwegians came, could 
not, as we have seen, utter the sound of b without putting the sound of m 
before it. They could not readily say Norbega, but said, because it was 
easier of utterance, Normhega. This was the name later given by the 
natives wherever along the coast, from Cape Cod to the St. Lawrence, 
explorers asked the name of the country occupied by the Norwegians. 
In answer to such questions the natives gave the name that had so long 
before been conferred, — Nor'mhega. This name seems to have been used in 
the sense of " belonging to Norway." Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, 
Dutch, and English navigators coming to our shores spelled the name 
Normbega variously. So we had Nonimbega ; we had the u in it replaced 
by 0, a, e, and i ; and we had bcga replaced by begue and hec and bagea, etc. 

1 A missionary to the Leuape Indians of Canada. ^ See Bordone. ^ See Maginn. 



20 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITi' OF NOEUMBEGA. 

Champlain (1G12) left the name of the country about the Penobscot Na- 
ranbcrguc. On one map only have I found Nere' iitlega. On three maps, 
obviously copies of a common original, I have found at the same point, 
respectively, Nonega, Noniega, and Norumbega} These three names on the 
separate maps were all alike in Nova Francia (New France). 

Now, in 152-1, after the Northmen in the basin of the Charles had moved 
northward, pursuing their industries along the coast, some naturally becom- 
ing merged in the Indian people, Verrazano, the Italian explorer under 
Francis I. and Madame the Regent of France, came here and saw traces of 
the former presence of the Northmen. There is recorded on his maps 
(Maiollo's and that of his brother Hieronymus Verrazano) Norman Villa,^ 
and Anorobagea, and -oranbega.^ Allefonsce's visit was later, in 1543 ; 
and he found the city and river of Norombegue in the forty-third degree. 
Thevet came later still, and found in the same degree the river, city, and 
fort, of Norumbega. These navigators and discoverers were all in the ser- 
vice of France. Breton French traders occupied the fort when Thevet 
was in this region. This portion of Massachusetts had been called Francesca 
and Gallia by Verrazano, and Terra de la Franciscane by Allefonsce. This 
was the earliest New France, — Nova Francia, — the name which Jacques 
Cartier in 15-34-1535 extended over the shores of the St. Lawrence, the 
story of which we have in the works of Dr. Parkman. The Dauphin map 
(1542-1543) confounded, as Sebastian Cabot's of 1544 did, the southern 
with the northern Cape Breton, or rather fused the two in one.* It was 
Allefonsce, the pilot of Pioberval, who in 1543 left, in the manuscript to 

1 Norvega was Norbega, as Sevastopol was Sebastopol, or as Eivero was Ribero ; and Norbega 
became Nor'mbega, as Boston becomes 'mBoston. Grotius and Forster recognized the possible 
identity of Norwega with Norumbega, as has Beauvois in recent times. 

2 Norman Villa is also on the Ulpius Globe in the same latitude. 

8 Norman's Woe occupies the site of, or is near to, the (N)oranbega of Verrazano. Not far away 
was the dialectic equivalent Naambeak of John Smith, and its near fellow of Naumkeag, in use to-day, 
and Namskaket and Amoskeag, already mentioned ; of close kinship, and in another direction, were 
Bogasto and Jar. Ven-azano records the lunga villa — such were the houses of the Northmen — and 
the sweathouse, or sio, as it is preserved in Boga-sto, in the town of Millis. 

* This is true of many others, includina; Vallard 1543, Diego Homem 1558, and Mercator of 
1569. 







ORTELIUS, 1570. 



Aj?rst 





lalsert miJa\ ' 



soz/s. /s ag 




BOTERO, 1603. 



"They sailed long until they came to a river, ^vhich flowed from the land 
through a lake and passed into the sea." Tliorflnn's Saga. 



"The French diplomatists always remembered that Boston was built within the original limits of 
New Trance" {BancrofVi History, 2d edition, p. 24). 



■•5r 




'^-^ 




V^tA__?A\Q^; 




..s^Jbi»^C<.cO p 



hrtui 9(IJ mnrt b'lv^oft rfoidv .ly/h r. o) '»(i'n/v«>ili liinu giiof boliiif "^sriT" 



KJtmH liinhirio srii oIiIJItj Jllijd «avf noJwff Jiiili hoMdragcnsi 8'tBwI« BJf.iJflmofqlb rian'j'il sriT" 

.(J'S .q .HoiJlbv bS .vstoSRsH. KTfvotrmoa) "ooavit wsK 



DISCOVEET OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 21 

which I have referred, the record of his discovery that there were iwo Cape 
Bretons. It is this original manuscript — of which I have with its pen- 
made maps the absolute copy — that has determined the site of the treasures 
of the forty-third degree. 

This Allefonsce manuscript determined our Cape Ann to be the southern Cape 
B"eto?i. It determined the river Charles to be the Norumbega. That is, the 
river Norumbega was in the forty-third degree ; it was a tidal river (Ver- 
razano and Thorfinn). " It is at its mouth full of islands which stretch out 
ten or twelve leagues to the sea." ^ Of such a tidal river there is but one in 
the forty-third degree. 

On the maps of which I spoke, where, at the same point and given as the 
alternative names of the city, Norumbega, Norvega, and Noruega are found, 
and where Norvega as a province occurs, there is also, and in the same pre- 
cise latitude, the Norumbega River. This was the Eio Grande of the Portu- 
guese, the Anguileme of Verrazano, the Mishaum (Big Eel) of the Massachu- 
setts Indians, and the Charles of Capt. John Smith. Over all, in larger print, 
on these maps, is the historic name of 

Nova Feancia. 

Of this New France Mr. Bancroft, our great historian, says : " The Feench 
diplomats nevee failed to eemembee that Boston was within the 

LIMITS OF THE OEIGINAL NeW FeANCE." 
HeEE was the OEIGINAL NeW FeANCE. 

If Boston was in New France ; and if the river Norumbega (the Charles), 
and the city of Norumbega and the fort of Norumbega, on the banks of the 
Charles, were all in New France as well as in the country of Norumbega, 
and in the forty-third degree, — then we cannot be in doubt as to where 
the Northmen came nine hundred years ago. As I have demonstrated 
elsewhere that Leif's houses were farther down the Charles, we cannot 
doubt that the Vinland of Leif was near the city of Norumbega of history, 

1 AUefonsce's mouth of the Charles had possibly an estimated width of " above forty leagueSj" 
or the mouth may have been " above forty degrees " of latitude. 



22 DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

tradition, and song. So eastern Massachusetts held both Vinland and the 
ancient city and seaport and river and fort of Norumbega. 

It is, as the French tell us, the unexpected that happens. I found my 
guide to the city in a single sentence in one of the sagas of Thorfinn 
Karlsefni, which appears, by an oversight of the scribe or copyist possibly, 
attached to the story of Freydis. Let me give the substance of it. 

Leif had built houses near Gerry's Lauding, and called the country Vin- 
land, and returned to Greenland. Thorwald had come to Leif 's houses, had 
explored the Charles, had found in it many shallows and islands, and a corn- 
shed on an island far to the west; had consumed a summer in his discoveries, 
and returned to Leif's houses in the autumn. In attempting exploration at 
sea he had been wrecked on Cape Cod, had repaired his ship and set up the 
old keel in the sand, and called the cape Kjalar-nes (Keel cape) ; he had been 
killed in battle with the Indians, and buried on the Gurnet. His crew had 
returned to Greenland to be succeeded by Thorfinn, who remained three 
years in Vinland, and because of Indian distrust and opposition gave up the 
attempt to settle the country. 

Thorfinn in his richly laden ship had returned with his wife Gudrid and 
his little boy Snorri to Greenland and to Norway ; had passed the winter in 
the society of the Court at Nidaros, the residence of the king, not far from 
the modern Thronheim. As he was ready to take his departure for Iceland, 
his future home, waiting at the whai'f for a favoring wind, there came to 
the ship a Bremen merchant who wished to buy his Jmsa-snotra. Thorfinn 
did not care to part with it. " / zdll not sell" said he. " I offer you a pound 
of gold [Beamish says, a half-marJc of gold'\" said the Southerner. '■'Karlsefni 
[Thorfinn Karlsefni] thought this a good offer, and closed the bargain. The 
German then tvent aivag ivith the husa-snotra. But Karlsefni hiew not zvhat WOOD 
^'jos in it ! It was mosurr frotn Vinland ! " 

Beamish estimated a half-mark of gold at £16 sterling, or about |80 
of our money (and much more, expressed by modern values of service or 
products of labor). What a sum for an article of household use, the chief 



DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 23 

value of which was in its wood ! What could mosurr ivood be ? And what 
was a husa-snotra? 

About the latter there has been endless speculation. Ilusa obviously was 
related to house ; but what did snotra mean ? One writer thought it a 
besom ; another, a broom-handle ; another, a bar to fasten the door from 
within. It might be a weathercock, a crown, a piece of decorative carving 
in wood. None were satisfactory. Professor Vigfusson — the late Icelandic 
Professor at Oxford — came to the conviction that it was an ancient Finnish 
word, now obsolete. 

The " Antiquitates Americanse " had been translated into Danish and 
Latin by Rafn, and most Vinland students had seen the Vinland Sagas either 
in the original or in one or the other of these two translations. I had 
not met a reference, in connection with the discussion of husa-snotra, to the 
summary of the Vinland Sagas in Peringskj old's translation of the Heim- 
skringla of Snorro Sturleson into Swedish and Latin.'' Might there not be 
another rendering in Swedish ? I learned of a copy of the first edition 
of Peringskj old's Heimskringla of 1697 in Stockholm, and was fortunately 
able to obtain it. In this, husa-snotra was translated tvag ^ in Swedish ; into 
Latin by stafera, or statera Mgiiea, " wooden scales " (scale-pans). The husa- 
snotra had possibly (probably) been wrought, or repaired (at least the scale- 
pans), by a sailor on his home voyage from Vinland, and presented to 
Thorfinn. It tvas a pair of house-scales, the scale-pans of which were of mosurr- 
wood? The husa-snotra was the equivalent of the house steelyard for weighing. 

Here is the significant sentence in the Saga : — 

" Thorfinn had wood felled and heivn and hrougU to the ship, and the wood 
piled on the cliff to dry." (See Cabot'.s translation.) 
Let us study it. 

It was felled. It was part of a groivn tree. 
It was hewn, to remove useless weight.* 

1 The same as in the " Codex Flatoensis," incorporated in the " Antiquitates Americanse " of 
Rafn, and translated by Beamish. ^ Pronounced ivoag, like goad. 

' Scale-pans of bronze are found in Sweden, of the bronze age. (Montelius, p. 114.) 
^ Leif also " liewed the cargo of wood for his vessel." 



24 DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

It was pUed on the cliff to dry. Why ? Because it was wet. It had been in 
the water. It had been cast into the river, or a tributary to it, ahove the ship. 

It had been floalcd to the shij). It had been fished out and carried to the 
cliff by hand. 

It was in Mocks that men could carry. 

It had been piled so as to be convenient for sliding to the ship, at the 
base of the bluff, when ready to receive its cargo. 

In these terms of analysis I found what led to the discovery of the 
desert's secret, — the ancient City of Norumbega. I saw — afar off, to be 
sure — what the Norman Knight almost saw in a mirage among the gor- 
geous clouds that sometimes gather about the setting sun. 

My study was at last rewarded. I had delved to the heart of the 
problem. As I look back upon the experience, I think it may not have 
been altogether a playful fiction that I uttered to myself, when glancing 
down the vista before me I said, "I have not only reached the heart of 
the problem, but I can feel its beat." 

IMosur wood, as I will presently explain to you, was the burrs or large 
warts that occasionally grow on certain trees, more frequently found in 
primitive forests, — as oak (one variety is called burr oak), birch, hickory, 
maple, ash. (Mosur wood = Knorrige Auswuchs, Old German.) 

I have said there were monuments of the presence of the Northmen 
on every square mile of the basin of the Charles. I find I must at once 
tell you what these monuments are. 

We have no account of transportation by the Northmen except by water. 
The mosur wood gathered by Thorfinn, we have just seen, was floated to the 
ship, which lay in the Charles, and then taken from the water to be piled on 
a clif, a blvff, a bank, out of the reach of high tide, to dry. We will assume 
what I cannot now stop to dwell on, — I have discussed it elsewhere at 
length, — that the spot where this occurred in Thorfinn's experience was 
at or near Gerry's Landing, just above the ancient bluff known as Symond's 
Hill, by the river (the site of Leif's houses), near the City Hospital. That 
was the spot where a great industry in Vinland began. The mosur blocks 





BURRS ON OAK TREES ON THE LINE OF DITCH LEADING TO THORFINN'S LANDING. 










stone Wall and Canal or Ditch near Noiso Dam. 




Stone Wall and Canal neai- the Norse Dam and Sililcy's Station. Fitchburg K. K 



DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 25 

were felled and heivn at first along the neighboring bluffs on the Charles. 
At the base of these bluffs are still ditches, or canals, into which the blocks 
may have been rolled, and along which, after the ditches were filled with 
the water at high tide, the blocks floated down to where the ship lay. 
The ship was the gcdhenng-place. The blocks had been "hroiigU to the ship." 
They were not taken on board immediately, but were removed from the 
water, and carried hj Imnd and piled on a cliff to dry. When the immediate 
shores of the river had been exhausted of the mosur wood, the shores of 
the tributaries flowing into the river became the field of activity, and the 
mosur blocks were sent floating down the streams ; and where the streams 
were remote from the bases of the slopes on either side, and sources of 
water were at hand, canals, or nearly level troughs, were dug to transport 
the blocks to the streams, and ultimately to the Charles. We now see why 
dams and ponds were necessary at the mouths of the streams, to prevent 
the blocks from going down the Charles without a convoy, and out to sea 
to be lost. Consider as an example the pond at the mouth of the Cold- 
spring Brook opposite Watertown. I call its artificial wall below a loom- 
dmn. It is a good example. There is another striking one just below 
Newton Upper Falls, on the left bank, through the ridge. The volume 
of water of the stream spread out against the dam would become, on the 
brow, too shallow for the blocks to pass over. They would thus be saved 
as logs are, by a boom across a stream down which they are floating. 

There is an admirable camil, walled on one side for a thousand feet, along 
the west bank of Stony Brook, in the woods above the Fitchburg Railroad 
Crossing between Waltham and Weston. The Cheesecake Brook is an- 
other, and Coldspring Brook another. There is an interesting dry canal 
near Murray Street, not far from Newtonville. It may be seen from the 
railway-cars on the right, a little to the east of Eddy Street, approaching 
Boston. The forts — dwelling-places surrounded by water, and in their 
day also by stockades — gave examples of ditches such as we have sur- 
rounding the ancient fort, near the Tower. 

The canals, ditches, deltas, boom-dams, ponds, fish-ways, forts, dwellings^ 



26 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

walls, terraces of theatre and amphitheatre, scattered throughout the basin 
of the Charles, are the memorials I had in mind when I said there was not 
a square mile draining into the river that lacked an incontestable monument 
of the presence of the Northmen. 

To make clearer our conception of the picture I am trying to present, 
let us follow an individual block of mosur wood. 

I have spoken of the canals at the base of the hillsides along the tribu- 
taries to the Charles. The block of mosur wood we will follow shall be the 
burr, or wart, growing on an oak near the top of the slope along Stony 
Brook, a quarter of a mile above the Fitchburg Crossing between Waltham 
and Weston. The tree on which the burr grows is felled by the axe, and the 
trunk above and below the burr cut off. The wood of the trunk portion 
of the block is hewn away, to reduce its weight and size. The block, so 
shorn and shaped, is rolled down the hill till it reaches the canal, where 
it floats with other blocks, rolled down by other choppers, in a sluggish 
current, to be discharged at the outlet into Stony Brook, or on a delta 
as at the end of the ditch near the Tower, which is on a little ridge pro- 
jecting into the bay, or hcga (literally a norumhega)} 

The discharge on the delta permitted assortment before making up the 
rafts that were to descend the Charles. This detention would enable each 
chopper, at intervals, to select and mark the fruit of his labor, or each 
contractor to gather and identify the results of the work of his several 
axemen. There were evidences, before the reservoir was established, of 
boom-dams and ponds on Stony Brook at various points above, which might 
have been used for marking or assorting and rafting the burrs. Once in 
the Charles, the rafts would descend to the required great boom-dam at the 
seaport of Norumbega, wherever that might be. 

Do some think that I have given undeserved dignity to the ditches in 
calling them canals ? They are so named in the old deeds, in Weston. If 

1 The Norse and Algonquin have common elements. I was at first surprised and then delighted 
with this coincidence. It points to deeper truth. The roots no and bih and the utterance ug are com- 
mon to Norse and Algonquin, and many other languages, classic and aboriginal. But this will be 
discussed at length elsewhere. 



EARTH WORKS 

siboVe 
5TDNY BRDDK 5TATIDN 

so too 200 300 400 500 ft. 



1888 






^^$k 



f^m^mm^'i^- 




7f 'sg£iff:%) .rfoJ.iausSS. 



EARTH WORKS 

above 
5TDNT BRDDK 5TATIDN 




aXflOW HTflA3 

MDITATE >\QQBB TMDTa 






688r 



cs^ajcivOSW/ 



Y' 




^hJUlh 



.A 




DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 27 

you look at them on the left of the highway between Sibley's and Weston, 
with the stone walls on either side, you will not wonder that the word 
"canal" as well as "ditch" should have suggested itself. They are so called 
on the published town maps of Millis and Holliston, many miles above us.-^ 

Now let us return to the sentences in the Saga of Thorfinn that have 
held such vast secrets. 

It was, we remember, a single article of domestic use, in part composed 
of wood, which was paid for with ,£16 sterling (Beamish), — a sum which in 
modern equivalents of labor would be several times greater ! It must have 
been something valued by the travelling Bremen merchant, not because 
of its association with Thorfinn, but for something else, to a merchant, of 
vastly greater moment. Let us assume for the occasion, what we shall 
presently find fully sustained, that it was because it suggested the basis of 
an industrial adventure. What then was it that gave value to the 

MOSUR WOOD ? 

In the last canto of "The Lord of the Isles" occurs the couplet (it is 
King James who speaks at the banquet), — 

" ' Bring here,' he said, ' the masers four 
My noble fathers loved of yore.' " 

A reference to the appendix of the edition of Scott edited by Lockhart 

reveals that these " masers " were wooden drinJcing-cups — flagons, beakers — 

mounted in silver, and kept by King Robert the Bruce as heirlooms in 

an iron chest, with other bric-a-brac, gold and silver ornaments, and the 

royal treasure. 

Maser wood was employed in the manufacture of communion cups for 

church service, — chalices, — and is mentioned in inventories of ancient 

cathedrals. It is also mentioned by Spenser, — 

" A mighty mazer bowl of wine was set." 

1 A friend who has repeatedly rowed his cauoe from Cambridge up the Charles for seventy-five 
miles and then returned by the same route, informed me, without knowing of my having written of 
the ditches or their office, that numerous canals were observed by him to enter the Charles. One in 
particular, near Dedham, called the " line ditch" cut ofE a bend of eight miles, traversing a swamp, 
and is a mile in length. 



28 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOKUMBEGA. 

And here is another aUusion to it by Ben Jonson, 

" All that H^'bla's hives do yield 
Were into one broad mazer fill'd." 

On going back to the root of the word, it proves to be the same as 
that of mass, and originated in the process by which cereal flour and water 
could, with kneading, be made to increase in size and become a mass. 
(Skeat.) The moistened gluten became adhesive ; more flour would cling ; 
and so, by alternate additions of water and flour and kneading, the dough 
would increase in volume. From this came the name maza, which the 
Spanish give to the dough of corn-meal, — a word in use in Mexico to-day, 
and the source of the specific botanical name of Indian com in Zea mais. 
The word in St. Domingo is maldz. The early Pilgrims heard of it as Indian 
maisiim. The kneading gave to the flour and water mixed a fibrous, inter- 
lacing texture, which bound the whole together. This, unfermented and 
slightly baked, was the mass, which gave its name to the Sacraments in 
which it served. Miiser wood possessed this texture. Maser, or mazur, or 
m'dsur wood is defined, in Old High German, as " warty outgrowth from 
trees," — we call them burrs, or borls. It could be wrought into thin 
forms, and would not readily crack or split. The Swedes had scale-pans for 
weighing made of this wood, thin and light, and also plates and trenchers 
and kneading-troughs and bowls and goblets. Maser wood is still used in 
this country to make mortars for grmding pepper, cinnamon, and the like 
in domestic service; also for kneading-troughs. There was a factory for 
wooden mortars and other products of the turning-lathe on Chester Brook, 
— Mead's.^ This wood may have been used more or less in the Old World 
in place of the costly bronze and perishable glass and earthenware, — great 
wants of civilization.^ In ancient and very early times it was used for 
war-clubs. A small growth of stem surrounded by a ring of the maser 

' Burrs are found of large size and numerous near Cotuit, Barnstable County, and also in the 
highlands near Amherst. I have found them occasionally on oak-trees in the forests along Stony 
Brook and at points farther up the Charles. 

' Such use is still widespread in Ireland and Scotland, once parts of Ancient Norway. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 29 

growth was easily converted into a war-club, — the club of Hercules. 
(Larousse.) It became the symbol of command carried by the leader, and 
was the foundation of a usage, or fashion, that prevails to this day, 
and preserves the use of the word in the mace, borne before the Speaker 
of the House of Commons as well as of the American Congress, — before 
the Lord Mayor, the Lord Chancellor, and so on.-' It gave the name to the 
companion of the billiard cue. "We see traces of this word in the maze of 
the dance and the maze of a labyrinth ; in mazurka, the Polish dance ; in 
macerate and massage, processes of kneading (see also master and measure; 
also the mass, — a unit in liquid measures in some of the States of 
Germany). 

Now, maser wood was tough, lasting, decorative ; did not grow every- 
where and on all trees ; was sought for, and paid for generously, by the 
Church, the aristocracy, the municipality, the government, and for domes- 
tic uses. It had already naturally become relatively scarce in Europe. 
It was a form of wood-growth that pointed possibly to the old age of the 
forest.^ A virgin supply would be a prize to be laid before enterprising 
merchants, wood-dealers, and decorators of houses and furniture. Leif and 
Freydis knew of its value, as also Thorfinn, and it was their principal 
cargo on leaving Vinland. The Bremen merchant was conversant with 
the wants of civilization and the methods of enterprise. Thorfinn did not 
notice, or take account of, the maser scale-pans of the husa-snotra from the 
point of view of the enterprising Southern man. He saw that the wood 

1 Certain officers of the Scotch Law Courts are called macers. See " The Heart of Midlothian." 
"^ Here may have been the seed of expansion into a great industry, and a commerce with the New 
World conducted primarily and chiefly by or through the Northmen. We catch glimpses of its spread, 
possibly, in the ancient Brazil (lie Arbres, island of woods), in baccalaos carried across the seas by 
the Basques, and in chance arrivals at other points in Europe. The JIassachusetts Indians conceived 
the early English colonists could have come only for wood. But even in Thorfinn's time, in the ac- 
count of Freydis, it is related that " the expedition to Vinland was commonly esteemed to be both 
lucrative and honorable." Her vessels, as we have seen, brought home wood from Vinland. Leif 
owed his added name — " the Lucky " — to having had the good fortune to save the crew of a wrecked 
ship loaded with wood on its way to Greenland. His own cargo was, in part, of mbsur wood. The 
importation of certain kinds of wood from the region of Vinland was already an established industry. 
Gudrid told the Pope at Rome of the Christian settlements by Scandinavians, already in her time, in. 
Vinland. See also Adam von Bremen. 



30 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

could he torougJU into thin forms, generally, without liuhilitij to crack or tvarp, and 
appreciated the significance of a new source of it. 

At first the maser Avood could be gathered near the settlement, as 
we have seen ; but the supply would soon be exhausted. The choppers 
must go farther. There were no horses, no roads. The obvious method 
of transportation was by water, — at first from the immediate wooded 
shores of the Charles, then from the shores of its tributaries, and then 
along artificial canals, conducting to these tributaries and the river. But 
to prevent the blocks from going out to sea, there must be dams at the 
mouths of the tributaries to arrest them. I had found many canals lead- 
ing to tributaries and to the Charles, when I reflected that if I had 
rightly divined the office of these canals, there must be at the mouth of 
each tributary, or along the stream near and above it, a dam and pond, 
or the remains of them or their equivalents, wherever the industry of 
the maser wood was prosecuted by the Northmen. I have traced these 
dams up the Charles nearly to its extreme source. I have followed them 
ou the Neponset and the Piscataqua, and on the tributaries to the Merrimac. 
I have found them tending southward to streams leading to Narragansett 
Bay. Not only the boom-dams at or near the mouths of the streams falling 
into the Charles, but the canals all over Newton and Weston, in Belmont 
and Watertown, and Woburn and Arlington and Medford and Cambridge, 
in Dedham and Millis and Holliston and elsewhere, are frequently walled 
with stone, as in the case of the Cheesecake, and of the Coldspring, where 
the Boston and Albany railroad crosses below Newtonville, and near the 
Cathohc Theological Seminary in Brighton, and where the stream crosses 
the highway between Sibley's and Weston, Undoubtedly the walls have 
been repaired in modern times, and in some cases it will be difficult to dis- 
tinguish between ancient canals and modern ditches for drainage. Some 
of the dams are very massive. In some cases the ponds have been more 
or less filled with alluvial deposit, and now constitute meadow-land, or a 
swamp, as at the mouth of the Cheesecake. In others a modern dam be- 
low has submerged the mouth of the stream, — in which cases the outline 



Between Pages 30 and 31. 




RIVER FLOWING THROUGH A LAKE 
INTO THE SEA' 

VINLAND OP THE NORTHMEN 

Gopiecl C/i^fler Ii^striiclior? by 



•■RIVER FLOWING THROUGH A LAKE 
INTO THE SEA' 
VINLAND OP THE NORTHMEN 




DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 31 

of the ancient dam is sometimes betrayed in the growth of shrubbery. 
In a few cases a canal ends in a delta, — as on Eddy Street in Newton 
near the fish-traps on the Cheesecake, and at the end of the canal near 
the Tower. In many cases the dam is accompanied by a fish-way, — as 
on the stream from Lexington to the Mystic, and on Mother Brook. 

Along these canals and tributaries are artificial islands that once gave 
sites and protection to Norse homes, — as you may see near the railroad 
station at West Newton on the street toward the Lower Falls, and near 
Burroughs Pond. One is still indicated in the grounds of Hon. Chauncy 
Smith in Cambridge, in the broad mound around which a canal formerly 
conducted water from the slopes beyond Craigie Street. The original 
path of the modern Brattle Street crossed on the boom-dam below the 
pond into which the canal led, and which has only recently been filled. 
The dwellings had the additional protection of stockades, like the old fort 
near the Tower, occupied after the Northmen by the Breton French as a 
trading-post, as remarked by Thevet. 

All these boom-dams at the entrance to the Charles point to a larger 
boom-dam across the Charles, where the total harvest of blocks from all 
the basins might be drawn from the water and piled to dry. That must 
have been near the place where they were shipped. 

Do you ask now. Where did these blocks find place for shipment? 
When I answer that, I shall have turned aside the screen which has 
so long baffled the students of New England cartography, and shown you 
the site of the ancient city of Norumbega. 

Go with me down the Charles from the Tower past Islington and Lily- 
Point Grove, and the great Watch Factory of Waltham, and the boom- 
dam at the mouth of Beaver Brook, now a pond filled with deposit from 
the brook, past the swamp at the mouth of the Cheesecake, past Bemis's 
Station, past the terraced hillside on the right, which is entitled to more 
study than I have been able to give to it, and at length we shall come 
to a stone dam over which the sweet water of the river pours to-day. 
This dam is made of field bowlders such as compose the beautiful new 



32 DISCOVERY OF TUE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

churches in Weston, Watertown, and Wellesley, — not square-cornered 
stones, or split or hewn, or the product of drilling in the quarry and blast- 
ing, but like the larger stones of the Tower, adjusted to their more stable 
positions. It is at the head of tide-water. Within the memory of liv- 
ing men, once only has the incoming tide risen above the crest of the 
dam. It was when the easterly storm and tide and wind swept away the 
Minot's Ledge Light. With that single exception, — so I have been 
told, — the dam has been the dividing line between fresh water and salt 
at high tide. 

Has it ever occurred to any one to ask how long that dam has been 
there ? The Watertown Historical Society has just come into being, or it 
would not have been left till to-day to demand an answer to this question. 

The earliest man of Winthrop's colony to ascend the Charles was 
Eoger Clapp (1630). His story is a part of the history of Watertown. 
Let me repeat it to you. He describes the narrow, shallow rapids below,^ 
which he reached, as he estimated, three leagues from the mouth of the 
river. His party found in the neighborhood an encampment of Indians, 
some three hundred by estimate, at the head of tide-water, where some 
of them were taking fish in the shallows above the tide-water. 

Clapp observed the shallows at the head of tide-water at Watertown, 
and also shared the product of the devices used by the Indians for fishing 
purposes just below, which involved the descent and fall of the stream 
as early as 1630. Wood, who came to the country the year before Clapp, 
and left in August, 1633, and whose book ("New England's Prospect") 
bears date of 1634, wrote of the fall of fresh waters and the fishing at a 
weir below. 

This fall and the fishing were mentioned by Josselyn in 1638. Later 
still, Dunton wrote of a ^^ great fall of fresh waters which conveigh them- 
selves into the ocean through the Charles River." 

1 The shallows — rapids at ebb-tide — prevented the explorers (Charaplain perhaps among them) 
from ascending the Charles to the site of Norumbega. Heylin and others ascribe to the falls on the 
American rivers the failure more thoroughly to explore the interior. Had the explorers gone up at 
flood-txAs, it might not have been left to our time to find Norumbega. 




ta s 



DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 33 

The weir fishing was continued by the whites, and the profit in later 
times divided between Watertown and Brighton down to 1860 j^ and I 
had the honor a few months ago to converse at length with the latest cus- 
todian of this industry, the present Town Clerk of Watertown, Mr. Ingram, 
who pointed out to me the theatre of the industrj^ with the weir. He 
conducted me also to the oldest map of Watertown, in the Secretary of 
State's office in Boston ; and on that I found traced the canal through 
which flowed the waters that turned, so it is said, the first wheel of the 
first flouring-mill of New England. 

Let us look a little further. There may be some among us who have 
not heard of Eoger Clapp, the first of the Puritans to reach the head of 
tide-water on the Charles ; or possibly of Wood or Josselyn or Dunton, 
who wrote of the spot a few years later. But there is one of whom 
every son and daughter of New England has heard, John Winthrop, — 
the great leader of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. He was the an- 
cestor of the venerable scholar, statesman, orator, public servant, who — 

" In an old age serene and bright 
And lovely as a Lapland night " — 

is the living object of our reverent and grateful homage. John Winthrop 
records an incident in the history of the Colony that relates to the age 
of the dam at Watertown. 

On the very spot where, according to popular belief,^ the first 
flouring-mill in New England — possibly in America — was set up, now 
stands its efficient successor (more than one generation of mills between), 
still in active service, depending for its water-power upon the same differ- 
ence of level between the water above the dam and below the mill, of 
which advantage was taken by the early colonists. The ancient mill was 
driven by an undershot wheel, as was the modern one, till the turbine 

* See Nelson's History of Waltham. 

' It may be that the mill-site at WateHown was the first which has been continuously occupied 
by a flouring-mill. Mill-stones were brought from England, and are mentioned in the cost of equip- 
ment for the colony. 



34 DISCOVEUY OF TUE ANCIENT CITY OP NOPvUMBEGA. 

came, the water passing under instead of over the wheeh It happened 
on one occasion that a Httle child fell into the raceway above the milL 
Before the eyes, but beyond the rescue of the miller, the child floated into 
the flume above the wheel. An accident had removed one of the blades 
of the wheel. As Winthrop relates, a special Providence directed that 
the current should bring the child exactly into the place of the lost blade 
of the water-wheel, — "for otherwise," he says, "if an eel pass through, 
it is cut asunder," — so that when the miller reached the outlet of the 
flume, he found the child absolutely unharmed, sitting waist-deep in the 
water below. And now, as long as the history of the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony shall be read, so long will the story of the wonderful deliverance 
of the little child be remembered as an incident of the early life of 
Watertown. 

The significance of the event to us is that it preserves the testimony 
of Winthrop as to the age of the dam above. The water-power was 
gained by the dam. It was a fall of only four and a half feet, as Mr. 
Magee, the present proprietor, informs me ; and this involved a canal or 
raceway of more than an eighth of a mile in length along the gentle 
descent of the Charles. 

Who built the dam ? It was made of natural, rounded, massive field- 
bowlders. English pioneers, sparing of time and men, in a region of 
virgin forests build dams of wood cut along the banks above and floated 
down, not of scattered bowlders gathered over great areas from the sur- 
face. When was the dam built? History is silent. Dudley, who had a 
lawsuit about the ownership of the mill, is silent. Winthrop himself is 
sUent. Could the thoughtful pen that recorded the discovery of Adam's 
chair, since lost, and again and recently found ; recorded the fight between 
the mouse and the snake, witnessed with such natural interest by the 
Puritans who formed a ring around the combatants ; as also this inci- 
dent at the mill-flume, — could the same thoughtful pen have failed to 
mention so considerable an achievement in the interests of the infant 
colony as the construction of a stone dam across the Charles, had it 














sitei^s3ii,^se_.^ 





to" 'yv ty gtijigj" f ,^7] ^ p~^ — w| v>. 



'<>■ \x:^ 




f-rr 









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^."■m:). 



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■^*gg^Jg>' <'''":*«' '• 



^^^^?r^ 




DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OP N0RUMBE6A. 35 

occurred contemporaneously with these other events? Impossible. What 
follows? This: The dam was here when Winthroj} came. 

But before Winthrop came, Roger Clapp had learned of the Indians 
fishing in the shallows at the head of tide-water, the fish beinf 
massed there, because they could get no farther on their way to spawning- 
ground. They were stopped by a fall in the course of the stream. When 
Winthrop first saw the fall it was a familiar fact. The dam was already 
built, and concealed under the fall of fresh waters. The fall was there 
before Clapp came. 

The earliest map of the site of Watertown, to which I have referred,, 
has on it the canal on which the flouring-mill was erected; and it is 
recorded that the colonists found the natural canal, or raceivaij, when 
they came. What again follows? This: The dam was the ivork of a 
lieople tvho had come and gone before the earliest English settlement on our 
shores. 

Look at the testimony of the weir. The structure consists of a low 
stone-wall, spanning the river, and shaped like the letter V, with the angle 
down stream, and a trap at the point. The weir is submerged at flood- 
tide. With the flood come schools of fish seeking spawning-ground and 
fresh water. In the absence of a dam there would have been nothing 
to arrest their progress, and they would not have stopped at Watertown 
any more than at any other point below or above. With a dam the fish 
would mass below, and with the ebb-tide seek escape at the angle of 
the weir. The fact that they were taken in great numbers at the pres- 
ent Watertown by a weir is absolute proof of the existence of the dam. 
Wood says one hundred thousand were taken in two tides, — that is, in a 
single day. The Indians had taught the settlers that the fish could be 
used for manuring their corn, and the poor crop of 1631 had made them 
feel the necessity of a fertilizer. 

In the spring of 1632, authorized by. Winthrop, the weir was com- 
pleted. The order presupposes the existence of the dam; without it the 
weir would have had nothing to catch. 



36 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

As Wintlirop was complained against by Dudley for thus personally 
authorizing (the General Court not being in session) the construction of 
the weir in the" winter and spring of 1631-32, it is clear the dam must 
have been previously built. 

The dam must have been built before 1631. It could not have been 
built by the handful of Saltonstall's half-invalid men between the autumn 
of 1631 and the spring of 1632. Why? They had quite enough to do 
to provide for the wants of their families. Moreover the dam was built 
of rounded bowlders gathered from the fields, not from quarries ; and 
that involved too much time and labor. How do we know it was 
built of field-stone, — rounded bowlders ? In this way. Not many years 
ago the foundations of portions of the dam were undermined, and the 
water broke through and left the structure bare to its base, open to 
any eye. 

Let us look at the Records of the General Court. 

Wood returned to England in August, 1633. He records, in his " New 
England's Prospect," that there was " a water milne on Stony Brook 
(Eoxberry) " and another in Saugus. The mill at Watertown is imder- 
stood to have preceded all others. If this be so, it must have been set 
up, at the latest, in 1633. It was a work of private enterprise, since 
later action of the General Court decided that it belonged to Mr. Dudley 
and not to Mr. Howe. At a town-meeting in Watertown, Jan. 8, 1634-5, 
it was " voted that four rods wide on each side of the river should be laid 
apart to the use of the ware, so that it may not be prejudicial to the mill." 
The necessity of defining the rights and wants of the weir and the mill had 
been revealed by experience in the years immediately preceding. 

The Records of the General Court contain its action at the session, 
July 5, 1631, authorizing a levy on the public for the opening of the 
canal along Blackstone Street from the cove at the present Haymarket 
Square through to the water at the east, and another levy, at the session 
Feb. 3, 1631-2, for making the palisade about Newtown (now Cambridge). 
Now, is it not clear that a large work on Charles River, like the building 




Between Pages 36 and 37. 



Between Pages 36 and 37. 




HELIOTYPE COPY OF WINTHROPS ORIGINAL MAP OF 1634. 
FOUND BY MR. HENRY WATERS IN ENGLAND. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 37 

of a stone-dam, involving the labor for a long time of a large number of 
able-bodied men, could not have been undertaken without discussion ? As 
a private matter, it could not have been done without capital and the co- 
operation of laborers ; as a public matter, it could not have been under- 
taken without the authority of the General Court; but of this there is no 
record. Contemporary or subsequent history does not mention it. 

Finally, it would have been much cheaper, and have required less time, to 
build a mill on Clematis Brook, with abundant fall, and only a dam of wood. 

The meaning of all this is that the dam was where it now is before 
Winthrop came.^ 

Why do I speak so confidently ? Fortunate leisure has enabled me to 
go far enough. in certain directions of study and exploration to see what 
must he as a matter of scientific deduction. When that point, the what must 
he, is reached, prediction is natural, unavoidable, and safe. As I prophe- 
sied from the literature of geography the finding of Fort Norumbega at 
the junction of Stony Brook with the Charles, and went to the spot and 
found it; and as I deduced the site of the remains of Leif's houses in 
Vinland from the necessities which the strict construction of the Sagas 
required, and went to the spot where I had indicated that the remains 
had once been, and found them there more than a year after the prediction 
was announced, — so I have arrived by inevitable deduction at the seat 
and centre of the early colony of Northmen in America. 

Let me be rightly understood. I do not deduce the maser industry 
from the presence of the dam at Watertown, but I deduce the dam and 
seaport and doch and tvharves as essential to the maser industry revealed in 
the Sagas, and confirmed in the walled canals boom-dams and deltas 
throughout the region. 

1 When my communication was made to the American Geographical Society, I had forgotten that 
I possessed Winthrop's map of 1634, one of the great prizes brought to light by Mr. Henry Waters 
in his researches in England. This map contains the dam separating salt water from fresh water. 
It may be classed among the curiosities of the fulfilment of prediction. Had the dam been built 
in Winthrop's time it must have been with his knowledge, and he would have called it a Dam, 
not a Rip, — the name he has given. 



38 DiscovKuy of tue anciknt citt of norumbega. 

I may not take your time to tell of my interviews with many of the best- 
mformed and elderly men of AVatertown, — with ladies who as little girls 
had gathered wild violets and anemones on what, with the exception of 
the trees, were the otherwise unoccupied islands below the dam, then as 
now walled about with substantial masonry without mortar ; or of my de- 
light in finding the walled channels between these islands, — at least four 
in number, — the docJcs ; or the black meadow muck under the gravelly earth 
that constitutes the body of the walled islands ; ^ or the parallel cyclopean 
walls extending on both sides of the river along the narrows and shallows to 
which Clapp came in 1630 (these walls, extending to the opening meadows 
toward the Arsenal, by narrowing the channel increased the depth of the 
water at high tide, and so made it practicable to float the blocks across the 
river from the boom-dams on the right bank below to the docks and wharves, 
as well as with greater ease and certainty to lead ships to and from the 
docks) ; or the long basin for the reception of blocks and their accumula- 
tion, which also serves as a fish-way^ into the basin from the north; or 
the great artificial basin (Cook's Pond), the product of the boom-dam, on 
the opposite side of the river, — all which, and much more that might be 
named, belong to the period of seven to nine centuries ago : ihe ivorh of 
the Northmen. 

These are remains of the ancient dty and seaport of Noriinibega. This was 
the site, pictured on so many ancient maps, at the head of tide-water, on the 
" River that floived through a Lake to the Sea," — the Hoj^ of Thorfinn, salt at 
flood-tide and fresh at ebb, — the ancient Boston Back Bay. The islands were 
wharves. The channels between them, closed or nearly closed at the iipper 
end near the basin, were doclis. On these wharves the maser blocks that 

1 This was alhvial soil, once the surface-soil, submerged at extreme high-tide below the falls, and 
deposited from the eddy of the flood-tide and current of the Charles before the dam was built. The 
proprietor of the foundry on the spot informed me that he had occasion to find substantial foundation 
to support parts of the foundry. He dug down through the gravel till he came to black meadoio muck, 
and through that to solid bottom. 

2 There is a fine display, already referred to, of boom-dams and fish-ways on Vine Brook, between 
the Arlington Reservoir and the Jlystic, and another on lilother Brook, leading from the Charles to 
a tributary to the Neponset. See town maps. 



Hi 




i 




'^ 



h'll}^^. 



"fV 







^i 







151ix-ks of pavement gathered in heaps from the bed of muck along Stony Brook. Glimpses of 
stream against shore in foreground. 




HeinoNJiii! nniik (lilaek vegetahlt^ mould) from under the pavement, to provide clean floor for the Reservoir. 



DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEHMBEGA. 39 

had floated down the Charles had been arrested by the dam and turned 
into the basin, — the northern canal, — whence they were taken out and 
piled to dry and await their turn to be shipped. 

Here, besides the conveniences for piling under cover the maser blocks, 
there were storehouses for dried salmon, for the peltry purchased in its 
season, and not impossibly for the Indian corn grown on the plains of 
Newton, Danvers, Millis, and Holliston. 

On the shores above and below were naturally shops for barter, and 
dwellings for all classes, and necessarily, with the culture of the Northmen, 
provision for amusement, for public worship, and for the wants of govern- 
ment, — the Althing, to which these early (perhaps earliest) self-governing 
people were accustomed. 

How did the country about look ? Sketches of its appearance have 
been preserved. 

Dunton was one of a party on horseback who rode through Cambridge 
and Watertown to attend the annual sermon preached to the Indians at 
Natick. It was in the latter part of the seventeenth century. They had 
stopped for refreshment at the Watertown of Saltonstall, near the little 
churchyard half a mile to the west of Mount Auburn Station. He says : 
" The Inhabitants live scatteringly ; within half a mile is a great Pond 
[Fresh Pond], divided between the towns. A mile and a half from the 
town is a great Fall of Fresh Waters [at the present Watertown], which 
conveigh themselves into the Ocean through Charles River. Having well 
refresh't ourselves at Watertown we mounted again, and from there we 
rambled through several Tall woods between the mountains, over many 
rich and pregnant valleys as ever eye beheld, beset on each side with 
variety of good Trees. So that had the most skilful Gardner designed 
a shady walk in a fine Valley, it would have fallen short of that which 
Nature had done without him." 

Did Dunton ride in view of the still living forest giants, — the Wa- 
verley Oaks ? ^ They were then two centuries younger. Can they be 

1 See Stillman's Picturesque Cambridge. 



40 DISCOVEKY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

among the patriarchal illustrations of the inherited taste in landscape 
gardening such as Dunton intimates he had not seen surpassed in the 
Parks of England ? 

Verrazano, a hundred and fifty years before, described lands as pleasant 
as it is possible to declare, and gx'and forests that an army, were it never so 
great, might have hid itself therein. Cambridge territory was a cultivated 
country to Champlain, and when Winthrop came. Look at the Terraces 
along the Charles below Watertown, and near Waltham, and the site of a 
vineyard on the hill west of Waltham ; at the terraced amphitheatre near 
Bird's Pond, a few I'ods from the Mount Auburn Station on the Fitchburg 
railroad ; and at the theatre below the Arsenal, across the road, and near 
the first corner on the left. How all these speak of the culture and the 
work of an ancient people ! 

What region is Dunton describing ? Can it have been anything other 
than that of the cultivated lands of the ancient Northmen, who lived at 
or near the city of Norumbega ? 

Here was the ancient seaport of Vinland, for the colony that came after 
Thorfinn left, to which in 1121 Bishop Upsi came to hold up the symbols 
of the Faith. The basin, wharves, docks, canals of this ancient seaport 
underlie the city of Watertown to-day, and are connected with and serve 
its most prominent industries. Here came and went the commerce of 
the Northmen first; later, the commerce of the Frenchmen, and possibly 
of still other peoples. Here, at the modern Watertown, was the ancient 
CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

I have not hesitated to state this as the result of research that may not 
be questioned, — a research that included the Landfall of Leif Erikson on 
Cape Cod, and the colonization of Massachusetts by Northmen nine hundred 
years ago. Any other view is instantly confronted with the inquiry of 
when and by whom, if not by Northmen, was the stone dam built across 
the Charles at Watertown ? 

To assert this conviction on which I stand because I cannot help it, 



DISCOVEKY OP THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 41 

I set up the Tower in Weston, at the mouth of Stony Brook, where I 
first found evidences of the work of the Northmen. 

Over the tablet set in the wall of the Tower, the genius of the architect, 
Mr. Tryon, has poised the Scandinavian falcon (the symbol of sovereignty 
in Iceland) about to alight with a new world in his talons.^ 

The inscription upon the tablet is designed to cover the principal ad- 
ditions to the history of the foundation of Massachusetts. 

Among the considerations that led to the erection of the Tower, besides 
those already mentioned, were these : — 

1. It will commemorate the Discovery op Vinland and Noeumbeca 
in the forty-third degree, and the identification of Norumbega with Norway, 
the home country to which this region was once subject by right of dis- 
covery and colonization. 

2. It will invite criticism, and so sift out any errors of interpre- 
tation into which, sharing the usual fortune of the pioneer, I may have 
been led, 

3. It will encourage archaeological investigation in a fascinating and 
almost untrodden field, and be certain to contribute in the results of 
research and exploration, both in the study and the field, to the histori- 
cal treasure of the Commonwealth, 

4. It will help, by reason of its mere presence, and by virtue of the 
veneration with which the Tower will in time to come be regarded, to 
bring acquiescence in the fruit of investigation, and so allay the blind 
scepticism, amounting practically to inverted ambition, that would deprive 
Massachusetts of the glory of holding the Landfall of Leif Erikson, and 
at the same time the seat of the earliest colony of Europeans in America. 

1 In Vigfusson's notes to Hornklofi's " Eaven Song " (Edda), the raven is spoken of as " sworn 
brother to the eagle." Also as " gory beaked " and as having "flesh cleaving to his talons." Prussia 
has an Order of the Black Eagle. In the Museum at Reykavik a falcon is mounted above the Presi- 
dent's chair. The eagle in earlier times was uniformly, though not invariably, the symbol of Sovereignty 
among the powers of Europe. 



42 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOKUMBEGA. 

Do you ask, How long were the Northmen here ? 

Dr. Henderson found, in his Icelandic Researches, 1813-14, that the 
Northmen — so called by Alfred — were in Vinland two hundred and 
twenty-seven years. This estimate is apparently based on the following 
two dates : (1) The date of the appointment of Bishop Gnupson (Erik 
Upsi) to Greenland and Vinland, which may well have been 1120, as he 
came in 1121 ; (2) The date from the Port Records of the arrival in Ice- 
land of the latest merchant vessel from Markland in 1347. This would 
make the interval precisely two hundred and twenty-seven years. But 
Norsemen were here earlier. Gudrid's namesake — the pale-faced, yellow- 
haired, large-eyed visitor, in dark woven-cloth petticoat, who spoke Ice- 
landic, and visited Thorfinn's wife at the site of Gerry's Landing — was 
here in 1009. The vigorous prosecution of the industry of masur wood 
doubtless followed very soon after the purchase of the house-scales from 
Thorfinn by the Bremen merchant. This was in about 1013. 

Maginn in 1597, Ramusio in 1565, Thevet in 1556, Allefonsce in 1543, 
and Verrazano in 1524 record the presence of a fine people, amiable, cour- 
teous, ceremonious. 

The Breton French were here as early as 1465 (Letter of Queen Regent 
Catherine de Medici to Forquevantes at the Court of Spain, Gaflfarel's 
"Thevet," p. 399), some thirty years before the Landfall of John Cabot in 
1497. They, the Bretons, possibly did not claim and occupy the territory 
till some time after the Northmen had left. 

This would leave it probable that the interval between the advent of 
the Bretons and the departure of the Northmen in the maser trade was 
one hundred years or more. 

It is certain from the foregoing that Northmen, to say nothing of 
the mixed race, were here — somewhere between latitude 40° and 
46° — from 999 to 1347, — that is, from the Landfall of Leif to the de- 
parture of the last timber-ship from Nova Scotia or Cape Breton. The 
Northmen were certainly on the Island of Cape Breton, as Norse names 
show. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 43 

The Breton French were here from about 1465 to 1630. The Enghsh 
have been here from 1620 to 1889. Relatively, the times are — 
The Norsemen for about .... 350 years. 
The Bretons " .... 170 " 

The English " .... 270 " 

If time would permit, I might tell you further of the Maser industry ; 
of the fisheries and furs and agriculture ; of the amusements, and the 
republican form of government inherited with the Norse blood ; of the social 
relations of the Indians with the Northmen, and the splendid men found 
by Thevet and Verrazano, and later by the Pilgrims and Puritans, in such 
samples of chieftains as Massasoit, Miantonimo, and King Philip.^ I might 
point out the course of the Northmen, after the maser blocks of the valley 
of the Charles had been exhausted, and their settlements elsewhere ; the 
traces of their stay on the Penobscot, and their progress through the State 
of Maine and Nova Scotia to Cape Breton ; the possible causes of the 
decline of Greenland; the final departure of the last ship in the maser 
trade from Markland (Cape Breton), and its arrival in 1347 in Iceland. 
I might hint at the lines of research specially connected with traces 
of the language of the Northmen and their literature, such as the fact 
recorded by Roger Williams that the title " sachem " or " sagamore " of 
the Indians has the same root, sale, as the Icelandic word for " king ; " 
and their knowing Charles's Wain as the constellation of the Great Bear, 
and the evidences of the presence of Northmen on the shores of Narragan- 
sett Bay. Much of this, however, I must leave to others, who haply will 
enter, with new enthusiasm and more time before them, into this fresh 
field in archaeological and geographical research. 

It has been suggested that the trustworthiness of my conclusions might 
be tested by the spade, — that bronze and pottery should be sought for. 
Articles of such materials were not improbably to some extent in use 

1 See Bodge's portrait of Canonchet, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, p. 143, 
April, 1890. 



44 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

in Vinland and Norumbega. Remnants of much corroded bronze have been 
found by NordenskjiJld in Greenhmd, from which place the early Northmen 
came. Porous pottery would, perhaps, be less likely to survive in such a 
climate;^ it has, however, been found in ancient Norway. But of imple- 
ments which we know from the Sagas were in use here by the Northmen 
we have found specimens. Thorwald's men subsisted through their first 
winter on the salmon of the Chai'les. Here is a stone sinker found near 
the site of Thorwald's dwelling-house. I have seen and photographed 
several others found along the banks of the Charles. Similar to these 
were the salmon sinkers used by the Indians. The equivalent of pottery 
found in Greenland, — wrought soapstone, — I have found at various points 
throughout the valley of the Charles.^ 

Here is an Indian arrow-point picked up on the field of the battle 
between Thorfinn and the Skraelings, in which a man of distinction, 
Snorri Thorbrandson, fell. His body was found, so the Sagas say, with a 
sharp stone sticking in his head. If the " sharp stone " may not have been 
a flint arrow-point, but a stone tomahawk, here is a sharp stone that 
may bear that name, which was found on the same battle-field. 

A great stone mortar, such as Northmen used in very early times to 
grind their grain in Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, was found, as already 
mentioned, near the site of the Tower, and is now set in the wall near 
its base. 

Copper and brass, in the form of implements of war or articles of 
decoration, have been found in graves within the territory of Norumbega. 
In the grave of Uncas, in Norwich, Conn., a very ancient maser-bowl, long 
used, was found, and is now preserved in the Slater Museum ; another 
was found in the grave of Miantonimo. I have photographs of them. 

The maser-bowl found with King Philip at the time of his capture is 
still preserved among the collections of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society. 

1 Glazed pottery, Du Chaillu says, was unknown in the north. Montelius says the same. 

2 Professor Putnam has described a quarry of soapstone and manufacture of soapstone vessels 
found in Rhode Island. I have fragments of soapstone vessels found on Long Island, New York. 




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DISCOVERT OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOKUMBEGA. 45 

I have seen stone tablets, bearing inscriptions apparently of great his- 
toric interest, some of which may have been wrought by men of Norse 
descent. Mr. Ober, of Beverly, has had them photographed. 

Such articles, as well as bronze and pottery, possibly await the student. 

My own search, however, has been less detailed. I have looked for 
the evidences and seats of certain industries pursued through long periods 
of time and on a large scale by Northmen; I have looked for the site 
and memorials of an historic city, built, long occupied as a seaport, and 
abandoned many centuries ago ; I have sought the birthplace of the earliest 
European colony on our shores, and something of its course as a people ; 
and I have to-day sketched the results of my labors. 



NOEUMBEGA. 

By JOHN G. WHITTIER. 



The winding way the serpent takes 

The mystic water took. 
From where, to count its beaded lakes, 

The forest sped its brook. 

A narrow space 'twixt shore and shore. 

For sun or stars to fall, 
While cYermore, behind, before, 

Closed in the forest wall. 

The dim wood hiding underneath 
Wan flowers without a name ; 

Life tangled with decay and death, 
League after league the same. 

Unbroken over swamp and hill 

The rounding shadow lay. 
Save where the river cut at will 

A pathway to the day. 

Beside that track of air and light. 
Weak as a child unweaned, 

At shut of day a Christian knight 
Upon his henchman leaned. 

The embers of the sunset's fires 

Along the clouds burned down ; 

"I see," he said, "the domes and spires 
Of Norumbega town." 



48 

" Alack ! the domes, O master mine, 

Are golden clouds on high ; 
Yon spire is but the branchless pine 

That cuts the evening sky." 

*' Oh, hush and hark ! What sounds are these 

But chants and holy hymns ? " 
" Thou hear'st the breeze that stirs the trees 

Through all their leafy limbs." 

" Is it a chapel bell that fills 

The air with its low tone ? " 
" Thou hear'st the tinkle of the rills. 

The insect's vesper drone." 

" The Christ be praised ! — He sets for me 

A blessed cross in sight!" 
" Now, nay, 't is but yon blasted tree 

With two gaunt arms outright ! " 

" Be it wind so sad or tree so stark, 

It mattereth not, my knave ; 
Methinks to funeral hymns I hark, 

The cross is for my grave ! 

" My life is sped ; I shall not see 

My home-set sails again; 
The sweetest eyes of Normandie 

Shall watch for me in vain. 

" Yet onward still to ear and eye 
The baffling marvel calls ; 
I fain would look before I die 
On Norumbega's walls. 

" So, haply, it shall be thy part 

At Christian feet to lay 
The mystery of the desert's heart 

My dead hand plucked away. 



49 

" Leave me an hour of rest ; go thou 
And look from yonder heights ; 
Perchance the valley even now 
Is starred with city lights." 

The henchman climbed the nearest hill, 

He saw nor tower nor town, 
But, through the drear woods, lone and still, 

The river rolling down. 

He heard the stealthy feet of things 
Whose shapes he could not see, 

A flutter as of evil wings. 
The fall of a dead tree. 

The pines stood black against the moon, 

A sword of fire beyond ; 
He heard the wolf howl, and the loon 

Laugh from his reedy pond. 

He turned him back : " O master dear. 

We are but men misled ; 
And thou hast sought a city here 

To find a grave instead." 

" As God shall will ! What matters where 
A true man's cross may stand, 

So Heaven be o'er it here as there 
In pleasant Norman land ? 

" These woods, perchance, no secret hide 
Of lordly tower and hall : 
Yon river in its wanderings wide 
Has washed no city wall. 

" Tet mirrored in the sullen stream 

The holy stars are given ; 
Is Norumbega, then, a dream 

Whose waking is in Heaven? 



60 

" No builded wonder of these lands 

My weary eyes shall see ; 
A city never made with hands 

Alone awaiteth me — 

" Urhs Syon mystica; I see 

Its mansions passing fair, 
Condita ccelo ; let me be, 

Dear Lord, a dweller there ! " 

Above the dying exile hung 

The vision of the bard. 
As faltered on his failing tongue 

The song of good Bernard. 

The henchman dug at dawn a grave 

Beneath the hemlocks brown, 
And to the desert's keeping gave 

The lord of fief and town. 

Years after, when the Sieur Champlaia 
Sailed up the unknown stream, 

And Norumbega proved again 
A shadow and a dream, 

He found the Norman's nameless grave 

"Within the hemlock's shade, 
And, stretching wide its arms to save, 

The sign that God had made, — 

The cross-boughed tree that marked the spot 

And made it holy ground: 
He needs the earthly city not 

Who hath the heavenly found. 



VINLAND. 

By E. H. clement. 



MIST AND FLOTSAM. 



A. D. 1000. 



Eakth endures; 

Stars abide — 

Shine down in the old sea: 

Old are the shores ; 

But where are old men ? 

I who have seen much 

Such have I never seen. 

Here is the land 
Shaggy with wood 
With its old valley, 
Mound, and flood, 
But the heritors? 
Fled like the flood's foam, 
The lawyer and the laws 
And the kingdom 
Clean swept herefrom. 

Emerson, Earth-Song. 

For Fancy's gift 
Can mountains lift : 
The Muse can knit 
What is past, what is done 
With the web that 's just begun. 
Emerson, The Poet. 

SoUNDETH the prophetic wind. 

The shadows shake on the rock behind, 

And the countless leaves of the pine are 

strings 
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. 



Hearken I hearken ! 
If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
Chanted when the sphere was young. 
Aloft, abroad, the pa;an swells ; 
O wise man, hear'st thou half it tells? 
wise man, hear'st thou the least part ? 

'T is the chronicle of art. 
To the open ear it sings 
Sweet the genesis of things. 

Emerson, Woodnotes. 

My spirit bows in gratitude 

Before the Giver of all good, 

Who fashioned so the human mind 

That, from the waste of Time behind, 

A simple stone, or mound of earth. 

Can summon the departed forth; 

Quicken the Past to life again, 

The Present lose in what hath been. 

And in their primal freshness show 

The buried forms of long ago. 

As if a portion of that Thought 

By which the Eternal Will is wrought, 

Whose impulse fills anew with breath 

The frozen solitude of Death, 

To mortal minds were sometimes lent. 

To moital musings sometimes sent, 

To whisper — even when it seems 

But Memory's fantasy of dreams — 

Through the mind's waste of woe and sin. 

Of an immortal origin! 

Whittibb, The Norsemen. 



MARE OCEANUM. 

When Earth's form and void begun 
Underneath the ancient Sun, 
Poured round all the flowing Ocean 
First obeying Law in motion. 
First of things terrestrial 
Acknowledging celestial ; 
Free still of all governance 
Save eternal ordinance. 
Universal potency- 
Lurks in all-embracing sea, 
All-watering stream, all-nouiishing, 
From seeding unto flourishing; 
Pervading earth in myriad form, 
Now glacier, now summer storm, — 
Visiting thus but to return 
Every drop to Ocean's urn ; 
All-bearing on its broad highway 
From yonder cape to far Cathay; 
Ever the same to all men free. 
Whoe'er on land may master be, — 
One law deduces history thence : 
Things continue as commence. 
When the first savage launched his tree, 
Bestriding it in southern sea, 
Then hollowed it, then shaped an oar, 
He linked the whole world shore to shore. 
So bid we vikings' history 



54 

Surrender us our mystery. 

Roman legions' solid walls 

Tell Britons still when they were thralls; 

But our unfathomable wave 

Was ne'er to old Rome's arms made slave : 

Yet Christian Rome's new influence 

Is wider traced by finer sense ; 

Surpassing war, a mission's zeal 

Red Eric tamed and laid Leif's keel, 

So the Sea's worshipper devout 

Will ever draw new wealth thereout. 

Or noon or night, or fair or foul, 

Patient as fasting monk in cowl, 

He cons Earth's opening page here spread, ■ 

A blank still, or, if writ, unread 

Save by the subtle divination 

Of Science's imagination. 



ODYSSEYS. 

Man here faced eternity, — 
Poring on the mystery, 
Ever venturing in its brink, 
Better learning not to sink, 
Still its wide, gray pastures grazing, 
Still beyond and farther gazing. 
The eldest heroes of the world 
Plied the oar and sails unfurled, 
The eldest poet sang the Sea: 
Make us another Odyssey! 
Tell us more, and always more ; 
How they added shore to shore, 
Out from Posts of Hercules 



55 

Toward the far Hesperides ; 
How Atlantis e'en they scanned, 
Or believed they traced its strand, 
Looming in enchanted mist; 
How, of sudden, sails were kissed 
By scented breeze from Happy Isles 
Whose fable seamen still beguiles. 
What an epos, from Phoenicians 
Down to merchanting Venetians ! 
Argive galleys, prows of Kome, 
Beaching e'en on our old home. 
Tell how Rome's puissant rule 
Reaches to the farthest Thule, 
And from lona's cloistered halls 
Christ's spell northmost lands enthralls, 
And Iceland, warming in its gleam. 
Blossoms in church and academe ; 
Until, surpassing all the earth 
In learning and in moral worth, 
Forth sends, in first millennial year, 
Princes and bishops even here ! 



WUNDERSTRAND. 

Tell not us that all is writ 

Of Ocean's lore, — not us who sit 

From birth in sight of Ocean's wonder, 

And dream what therein is or under. 

Many a record writ in water. 

Making history-books the shorter, 

Reappears to him who heeds 

The truth that every law must needs 

Bear but one fruitage, near or far. 



f56) 

This age or that, on any star. 

So clear-eyed Science, sage, sedate, 

Bidden by Fancy all elate, 

Constructs the ships the dreamer dreams, 

Figuring the very ribs and seams, 

And, led by poet's ecstasies. 

More and more of truth still sees. 

Shore-dwellers never quit their stand 

Of watch upon the wonderstrand. 

Noting the moods of the changing sea 

For what new teaching thence may be. 

E'en seaweed thrilling message bore, 

"In the sun and the wind and the wild uproar,' 

To him who sang how Boston Bay 

Takes Boston in her arms each day. 

The child the salt waves reared beside, 

Whose playfellow is the rising tide. 

And tiny, monster-peopled pool, 

Among the rocks, his earliest school, — 

No chapter of a sea romaunt 

His fervent faith may ever daunt. 

The time-worn wi'eck's ribs in the sand 

For chapel of devotions stand. 

He knows the wild-flowers of the deep, 

The harvests strange that fishers reap, 

Eels Portuguese, and squids, and whales. 

He lists old seamen tell their tales ; 

He sees one morn from shining sea 

A fin revolved all silently, 

Marking Behemoth's bulk beneath. 

Or sea-dog's eye in green wave's wreath. 

He sees the ebb bare Ocean's bed. 

And flood the broad seas inland spread; 

Shudders at storm-rote in the night, 

And finds the broken ship at light. 



57 

He knows how homing sail round up 

From underworld, — first the maintop, 

And then the mizzen, and then the hull, 

As up the long swell rides the gull. 

He once beholds in a mirage 

Brigs bottom up and strangely large 

Stand in the sky athwart Broad Sound, — 

A sworn sea-serpent's sauntering ground, — 

And harks the nixeys ring the bell 

Whose dolors mark the east wind's swell. 

His childhood's awe is ne'er forgot 

Of maelstrom in steep Shirley Gut, 

Nor seasoned yet the child's surprise 

Who saw before his infant eyes 

Side-wheeled Cunarder overwhelm 

With British smoke the wine-glass elm 

Of Apple Island. Small things ? True : 

Small thing for wonder is it, too, 

That ships that fared to Greenland's shore 

Should southward fare a little more: 

Gloucester now fishes Iceland seas, 

Iceland then came to Penikese. 

Light then as now did shallop run 

O'er morning sea in jocund sun. 

Hands stout as now when night winds rave 

The rudder grasped and cut the wave, 

Sweet then as now the smooth bay's reach, , 

And soft to keel the sandy beach. 

A marvel greater far it were 

If ne'er a bold adventurer, 

To make the farthest voyage his boast. 

Had wandered on from coast to coast. 

Would such his lengthening leagues have reckoned 

So long as Blue Hill onward beckoned? 



58 



VINLAND RUNE. 

SrNG we, then, a rugged rune, 

In Emerson's and Whittier's tune, — 

Verse for honest-spoken folk. 

Compact of stuff as egg of yolk, 

Simple, blunt, but yet not coarse ; 

Native, and still something Norse, 

As is meet for kindred race 

Dwelling in the very place 

Where the Norsemen moored their ships 

And left their names on savage lips. 

Italian Colon Iceland sought. 

And tales the bardic sagas taught 

Of ancient trips to Western seas 

Were treasured by the Genoese. 

Americus's traitorous tale 

Too long is suffered to prevail: 

Christopher was not alone 

Victim for a time outshone, 

Where that crafty story spread. 

Other voyages now are read, 

Other learning now avails, 

With North and South in balanced scales. 

Not for all wear are silk and satin ; 

Not all was writ in Greek and Latin ; 

Tongues in rich diversity 

Make modern university 

Open arms to newest lore. 

Thin conceits of old give o'er, 

Barbarous birth our language owns, 

Gothic pith is in our bones; 

Heart of heart in kinship warms, 



59 

With levelling Vandals' peopling swarms, 

Sturdiest stocks of old Caucasian, — 

Liberty, self-rule, their passion, 

Ever the same from earliest hour 

To Alfred, King, and our own Mayflower. 

From folk-mote to the Commonwealth 

Is one straight march, naught won by stealth, 

But bold in name of law and right, 

Of people's need and people's might. 

Kingcraft nor priestcraft frames decree 

For them who dare the unpassed Sea. 



IDYLS. 

A "WONDROUS task waits him who sings 

The idyls of our uncrowned kings. 

But who begins must sail with Leif, 

Eed Eric's son, and that oft wife. 

Fair Gudrid, and wise Karlsefne, 

And all the sagas' company, — 

Peeling, like pilot, through their lore, 

The mist and flotsam of our shore, 

Wafted from that hurricane 

Of Danish vikings from the main 

That brought Canute to Britain's coast,— 

Spawn of her ocean-ruling host, — 

And reached our capes with circlings spent 

Ere Harold's dynasty was rent. 

'Mid these dark waves of history 

Comes drift galore with poesy. 



GuDEiD, the wife of three, the sage and sweet, 
Gudrid, the mother of that Vinland babe 



60 

Whose coming made the first home ou our shores. 

Mother of Greeulaiid bishops, and lierself 

In saintly age welcomed as nun 'it Rome, — 

Of all sweet women of the idyl's world 

None than our Gudi-id is more debonair. 

What time brave Leif the title "Lucky" won, 

Because it was his lot to save a score 

Of shipwrecked voyagers huddled on a rock 

In midmost ocean, Gudrid then appears. 

First Thorer's bride, still but a fair-haired girl, 

True floweret of the sea, lissome and strong. 

Sharing her viking's joys and strifes and toils. 

Leifs foster-sister thence, and cherished well: 

Her husband dead, when suitors came to woo 

Leifs word decided for her, and by him 

Was given her hand to Thorstein Ericsson. 

Penelope was not more chaste and wise : 

When Thorstein Black folds her within his arms, 

Beside her second husband's dying bed, 

She gently puts him by, returns to Leif, 

And understanding well (so sing the bards), 

How to conduct herself, with due delay 

Weds opulent Karlsefne, merchant bold. 

And with him fares to Vinland. Here one day, 

As Gudrid sat beside her cradled babe, 

(The baby Snorre, named Karlsefnesson, 

Grandsire of Ingveld, mother of Bishop Brand,) 

A shadow filled the doorway, and there stood 

An Indian woman, but pale and wild of eye, 

(Such eyes, the saga saith, that none so large 

Were ever seen in human face before,) 

With yellow hair, like to the Northmen's locks, 

A kirtle black and snood, and yearning said, 

"What art thou called?" "Gudrid," the wife replied, 

And bade her welcome. " And what art thou called ? " 



61 

" Gudrid," the savage answered, but just then 

Great din of battle rose without the door, 

A SkraelHng fell slain by Karlsefne's band, 

And fled the great-eyed squaw with yellow hair. 

So evermore this apparition hauuts 

The Iceland sagas ; aud when tales went round 

Of Greenland ships that never had returned, 

The fair-haired Skraelling stirred some dread surmise 

Of Northmen living lost on that far coast. 

With Skraelling daughters called by old home names. 

And blond, with yellow hair and wide blue eyes. 

So Gudrid passes, graceful, gracious form. 
Amid salt bands of bearded mariners. 
Bearing to Rome their grail of massur wood, 
The veinings carven in a woven rede, 
With Iceland's falcon as a dove of peace. 



See, for her foil, Freydis, the sister strange 

Of gentle Leif, manlike as Macbeth's wife, 

Daughter of Eric, the red-handed Thane, 

Heading the voyage of Helge and Finborg, 

Plotting against them with outnumbering band, 

And when her stronger will and craft had won 

Advantage over them and discord reigned, 

Slew them at night, and since no man of hers 

Would slay their women, " Give me the axe ! " she cried, 

Nor stayed her arm till all lay in their blood ; 

Then stormed upbraiding to her husband's bed. 

But bribed her band to secrecy at home 

Of all the sorry work on Viuland shore. 

Thoehall, the Hunter, what a figure he 
For tale of heroes I Burly, taciturn. 
Sarcastic, sceptic 'gainst the new-won faith, 



62 

Thor vaunting over Christ, and breaking off 
From his companions to scour strange wilds alone. 
The Melancholy Jacques's prototype I 
Him the fleet-footed Scot slaves sent to save 
Found lying on a hill-top muttering verse, 
Breathing the whiles in frenzy strange and loud, 
Possessed by spirit of the Norseland seer. 



And what a Lancelot these sagas sing ! 

Biorn Asbrandson, wooer of Thurid, the wife 

Of Thorodd, whom the Orkneys' Earl, Sigurd, 

Owed for the rescue of his tithing-men. 

An idyl all his own this Biorn claims! 

None but great Meister of the Nibelung's Lied 

Its towering passions could in art unfold, — 

Drama of wonders, valkyrs, chivalry. 

Of combats, banishment, and dauntless plans 

Of guilty heroism. Tannhauser-like, 

The erring knight to tears of shame is brought 

By Thurid's brother, the priest of Helgafell, 

And so flies in self-exile far to the south ; 

And after many years, when Iceland men, 

Wrecked beyond Vinland, faced a warlike host. 

As sachem (so too Northmen called their king) 

Under its banner rode an aged knight. 

Tall, straight, white-bearded, and in Northern speech 

Addressed them, and so, learning whence they came, 

Plied them with questioning of things at home, 

Bade them make sail and flee while yet they might ; 

But ere they were gone whispered to Gudleif low, 

" This sword to Kiarten, hero of Froda, take, 

And to his mother Thurid give this ring ! " 

And so is left this knightly figure here, 

Forerunner, haply, of great sagamores. 

Friendly Canonicus and Massasoit! 




MEMORIAL TOWER AT FORT NORUMBEGA. 

SET UP 1889. 

AT THE MOUTH OF STONY BROOK, ON THE CHARLES. 



63 



ENVOY. 

Btjild, O, build in loftier line 
Than this prosing verse of mine, 
Poets of our native land, 
An epic of our wonderstrand, 
Worthy of the heroes' grace 
Who first revealed it to the race, 
Lo ! our own heroic age I 
'Tis our classic heritage, 
Linking us by line direct 
To demigods too little recked 
Since the conquering Latin host 
Set up their gods for those we lost. 
Christian sweetness, Gothic right, 
Married in one shining light. 
Breaking mediseval night. 
Lit on Europe's northern shore 
Beacons to burn forevermore. 
When old St. Botolph's tower was new, 
For boat-help builded as was due 
That seaman saint of North Sea's shore, 
Men still told Gudrid's story o'er. 
Her pilgrimage, her wise, brave ways, 
Coupling her works with his in praise. 
This tower to her folk we rear, 
A beacon to Discovery, — 
Since ever truth shall make us free, — 
That our free thought may wax the freer. 
That we may welcome aye the new. 
Patient to try if it be the true. 
Nor say there is no more to hear. 



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